The Single 12V Rail SilverStone Olympia OP650
by Christoph Katzer on July 13, 2007 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Secondary Side
The secondary side has its own printed circuit board just as the primary side does. The board contains the protection features (including OCP, OPP, SCP, and UVP) and the fan control. The fan control is connected to two temperature sensing diodes which have been attached to the secondary heatsink (the hotter heatsink while running). They are attached on the right and left side and interact with each other to control the speed of the fan. The upper connector on the PCB is the output to the fan on the upper side of the power supply. The output is controlled through a potentiometer.
On the lower right edge of the PCB we found a small switch. This switch is actually to turn off the OCP on each of the four 12v rails to "combine" them into a single one. This is a very common method as most other manufacturers approach rail separation the exact same way. Normally separated 12v rails can be generated with just these separated OCPs on each rail. They have one or two 12v rails and just split them into a few more in order to show a higher number of 12v rails.
All the capacitors on the secondary side are from Taepo. The company is quite popular and used by many other manufacturers as well. The cables are nicely connected to the PCB and all of the cables have shrinking hoses in the end, how it should to be for certain security matters. The coils have a very good winding quality like all the others in this PSU as well. It would have been nice if Silverstone had started the sleeves of the cables inside of the PSU. This raises the overall quality and importantly for most users it looks better.
The secondary side has its own printed circuit board just as the primary side does. The board contains the protection features (including OCP, OPP, SCP, and UVP) and the fan control. The fan control is connected to two temperature sensing diodes which have been attached to the secondary heatsink (the hotter heatsink while running). They are attached on the right and left side and interact with each other to control the speed of the fan. The upper connector on the PCB is the output to the fan on the upper side of the power supply. The output is controlled through a potentiometer.
On the lower right edge of the PCB we found a small switch. This switch is actually to turn off the OCP on each of the four 12v rails to "combine" them into a single one. This is a very common method as most other manufacturers approach rail separation the exact same way. Normally separated 12v rails can be generated with just these separated OCPs on each rail. They have one or two 12v rails and just split them into a few more in order to show a higher number of 12v rails.
All the capacitors on the secondary side are from Taepo. The company is quite popular and used by many other manufacturers as well. The cables are nicely connected to the PCB and all of the cables have shrinking hoses in the end, how it should to be for certain security matters. The coils have a very good winding quality like all the others in this PSU as well. It would have been nice if Silverstone had started the sleeves of the cables inside of the PSU. This raises the overall quality and importantly for most users it looks better.
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Araemo - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
That makes sense, and makes me think my guess about the 20A limit is possibly a contributing factor - It would be a safety issue if someone hung 40A worth of fans, lights, motorized case windows, whatever you want.. off of one pair of wires (IE, one molex connector feeding into the mass of extenders and passthrough connectors that most fans and lights I've seen use.).You'd likely overheat the wires carrying all that power, if not the connectors as well, which could cause fire or electrocution hazards.
While a GPU may draw significantly more than 20A, they are also using 3 pairs now, so the actual power draw will be closer to 20A per pair.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
The PCIe V2.0 PSUs I've seen suggest only using connectors from the same 12V rail for PCIe graphics cards -- because if you don't, you'll be connecting the common from two different 12V rails together.This can cause issues.
If a graphics card has one 4pin and 1 8pin connector, like the HD 2900 XT, the GPU can potentially draw up to 225W from a single 12V rail through 2x PCIe graphics power connectors (3 pairs). That's about 19 amps through one rail for one PSU, but not over each pair.
SilthDraeth - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
They explained it.The Intel ATX standard calls for no more than 20 Amps per 12V rail. So in order to avoid maxing out a single 12V rail at 20 Amps, PSUs have multiple rails support up to 20 Amps each.
If you use a single rail that can max out at 54 Amps as stated here, then you do not need the additional rails, but you are going against the ATX standard.
Duraz0rz - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Also, I didn't see if there was a reason that it was advertised as a single rail, yet you have 4 12V rails.Nice article...really love the line curves for the load outputs. One thing I noticed missing is ripple testing. Any reason why it's not here?
SilthDraeth - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
That confused me as well. I think they mentioned that the PSU supposedly includes an ability to turn the other rails off, but it doesn't work, and it always has 4. They did state the PCB was originally designed for 4 rails.Duraz0rz - Friday, July 13, 2007 - link
Nevermind...disregard my statement about the ripple testing. I probably just missed it in the original article after skimming the comments from it :)